New Orbx Central v4.0 now available to download

[kevinfirth 1,396]

appears to me that the arrival of the new FS plus the impact of the problems with OC have probably impacted on business a little.  I know they've both affected my personal purchasing.

[xxd09 68]

Me too

xxd09

[fta2017 160]

Or perhaps people are a bit peeved that Orbx has reduced the frequency of their sales? The last sale was in May and there was no summer one held at all. I would say conversely to what is being touted here, that Orbx is in better financial health than ever before if it can afford to limit the number of sales it has and try a few different marketing initiatives like contests etc.

 

FWIW I have had zero issues with OC including having it continue to run in the background, have three sims supported (XP11, P3D4, AFS2), have multiple libraries for each sim, including the ability to have addons inside the sim folders, have backups saved for every install on a cheap 8GB HDD and also store my CC details with Stripe so I never have to visit their OrbxDirect website again. 

I could never go back to FTXCv3 - OC is orders of magnitude ahead in terms of functionality and pure demonic speed of downloading and installing.

[kevinfirth 1,396]

1 hour ago, fta2017 said:

Or perhaps people are a bit peeved that Orbx has reduced the frequency of their sales? The last sale was in May and there was no summer one held at all. I would say conversely to what is being touted here, that Orbx is in better financial health than ever before if it can afford to limit the number of sales it has and try a few different marketing initiatives like contests etc.

 

FWIW I have had zero issues with OC including having it continue to run in the background, have three sims supported (XP11, P3D4, AFS2), have multiple libraries for each sim, including the ability to have addons inside the sim folders, have backups saved for every install on a cheap 8GB HDD and also store my CC details with Stripe so I never have to visit their OrbxDirect website again. 

I could never go back to FTXCv3 - OC is orders of magnitude ahead in terms of functionality and pure demonic speed of downloading and installing.

Glad you had no problems.  The offputting thing for me was Lorby's advice that it wasn't a good idea to use his scenery editor and use OC.  In a straight contest between the two I'm afraid there's no doubting which one wins...  If I hear enough people saying they appear to play well together I'll go to OC.

[Christopher Low 5,358]

Everything appears to be OK with my existing ORBx scenery packages after installing ORBx Central, but the real test will come when I install any new ORBx products, since they will be installed with the new addon.xml method. My requirements are that I can determine where they are located in the Scenery Library, and also that they can be disabled when required. Having all installed scenery packages active for every flight is not a sensible option in P3D.

[Pete Dowson 558]

11 minutes ago, kevinfirth said:

The offputting thing for me was Lorby's advice that it wasn't a good idea to use his scenery editor and use OC.  In a straight contest between the two I'm afraid there's no doubting which one wins...  If I hear enough people saying they appear to play well together I'll go to OC.

I used both.  I had to install Orbx Central 4 in order to install the recent EGLC (which is excellent, BTW). After that the only problem I got was that the Lorby AddonOrganizer complained that the Add-On XML for a registered product (ObjectFlow 2) was missing, and advised not to continue.

I found the missing folder (for it was the Add-Ons folder which was missing -- in my Prepar3D v4 Add-Ons). It was in a recent backup.  I put the folder back, then booted AddonOrganizer with no error message. It then said there was a new package (Orbx ObjectFlow) and asked whether I wanted to enable that. So I said yes, and continued. Looking at the package list in that program I saw both ObjectFlow 2 and ObjectFlow.

I think Central 4 installed a new ObjectFlow, but now it has dropped the '2'. And it therefore deleted that folder. This represented a contradiction for AddOnOrganizer. I just disabled ObjectFlow 2 in AddOnOrganizers pakage list, and left ObjectFlow enabled.

Results: all good!

Pete

 

[Pete Dowson 558]

3 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

My requirements are that I can determine where they are located in the Scenery Library, and also that they can be disabled when required.

Addon.xml packages can be enabled/disabled by menu inside P3D, but AddonOrganizer is the better choice, as you can then do it before starting P3D. I believe that program offers an option to make groups, so you could then enable and disable regions etc. (But don't hold me to that).

Pete

 

[kevinfirth 1,396]

Just now, Pete Dowson said:

I used both.  I had to install Orbx Central 4 in order to install the recent EGLC (which is excellent, BTW). After that the only problem I got was that the Lorby AddonOrganizer complained that the Add-On XML for a registered product (ObjectFlow 2) was missing, and advised not to continue.

I found the missing folder (for it was the Add-Ons folder which was missing -- in my Prepar3D v4 Add-Ons). It was in a recent backup.  I put the folder back, then booted AddonOrganizer with no error message. It then said there was a new package (Orbx ObjectFlow) and asked whether I wanted to enable that. So I said yes, and continued. Looking at the package list in that program I saw both ObjectFlow 2 and ObjectFlow.

I think Central 4 installed a new ObjectFlow, but now it has dropped the '2'. And it therefore deleted that folder. This represented a contradiction for AddOnOrganizer. I just disabled ObjectFlow 2 in AddOnOrganizers pakage list, and left ObjectFlow enabled.

Results: all good!

Pete

 

Thanks Pete, that counts as an endorsement, I'll give it a go. Cheers K

[Christopher Low 5,358]

Just now, Pete Dowson said:

Addon.xml packages can be enabled/disabled by menu inside P3D, but AddonOrganizer is the better choice, as you can then do it before starting P3D. I believe that program offers an option to make groups, so you could then enable and disable regions etc. (But don't hold me to that).

Pete

 

Where are the addon.xml packages enabled/disabled in P3D?

[F737MAX 5,617]

1 hour ago, fta2017 said:

Or perhaps people are a bit peeved that Orbx has reduced the frequency of their sales? The last sale was in May and there was no summer one held at all.

And that would be a petulant response by people.
The last sale was the ’33-For-3′ Sale at the end of June.

1 hour ago, fta2017 said:

I would say conversely to what is being touted here, that Orbx is in better financial health than ever before if it can afford to limit the number of sales it has and try a few different marketing initiatives like contests etc.

That does not appear to be the case. You offer price promotions to keep revenue coming in the door, but that has a cost on the bottom line at the end of the financial year.
The contest is an attempt to generate more full-price sales in a quieter part of the year without throwing away profit margin by offering lower cost products. The need for such marketing initiatives belies short-term rude financial health.

I appreciate a sale as much as the next person, but Orbx have had a lot more promotions in the last 12 months than they had in the ~18 months before (i.e. since the release of P3D v4.0). And they're not the only ones, we've even had PMDG offer their first ever promotion.

22 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

Is the flightsim industry in such desperate straits that it has to resort to contests?

4 hours ago, domkle said:

I agree that repeated promotions are not exactly  a good sign.

We've seen in a few years, the "annual sale" of most of the developers becoming a 5 or 6 times event, setting up de facto a weird dual pricing on this market. A company known for its absolutely-no-sale policy just did one (once in a lifetime only, of course....). Good for us ? On the short term. only.

I agree. Developers are between a rock and a hard place. Since the MSFS announcement, many simmers have said that they will stop buying products altogether for current sims. A larger number (me included) have decided to reduce the number of add-ons that they will buy.

IMO, it's going to take some imagination and a steady stream of quality products by developers to keep the sales receipts coming in.
Those that can't, won't be around to get onto the MSFS bandwagon and reap the benefits.
 

[Pete Dowson 558]

6 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

Where are the addon.xml packages enabled/disabled in P3D?

Addons submenu somewhere. Sorry i can't remember exactly the main menu to select, and I don't have P3D running at the moment. But it is distinct from the Addons men with the options for the likes of GSX, FSUIPC etc.

Pete

 

[Dominique_K 10,150]

2 hours ago, fta2017 said:

Or perhaps people are a bit peeved that Orbx has reduced the frequency of their sales? The last sale was in May and there was no summer one held at all. I would say conversely to what is being touted here, that Orbx is in better financial health than ever before if it can afford to limit the number of sales it has and try a few different marketing initiatives like contests etc.

First I don't know anything about the financial situation of OrbX. I trust John V to be an astuie manager. My remarks were more general in nature. This market has been showing signs of stress for some time now. you don't make sales  if you don't need to.

Besides, OrbX has done a lot of recruitements this summer and aim to to release 127 products  from now to June. and I suppose they need a little cash .They didn't choose a "different marketing initiative."  They chose a solution that theorically yields a better financial return (the contest) than a discount sale. I hope for them it works because it is not obvious it does. 

[Reader 2,030]

13 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

Where are the addon.xml packages enabled/disabled in P3D?

 

In the in-game drop down Options\Add-ons menu.

[GSalden 4,673]

On 8/30/2019 at 1:52 PM, Christopher Low said:

I remember something about "migration" in one of these threads, but I was never even asked a question about that during the installation process. My existing ORBx scenery is probably in exactly the same location as it has always been (since installation of ORBx Central was super quick), so I do not expect to suffer from any problems

For the record, is it possible to configure ORBx Central so that individual products are "inserted" in specific locations? ORBx TrueEarth GB South needs to be located below my UK2000 airports (and SimWings Heathrow Professional) in the Scenery Library, and TrueEarth Netherlands needs to be below FlyTampa Amsterdam Schiphol, so I want to be able to move TrueEarth GB Central and North down the list when the P3D v4 versions of these two regions are released.

Let's hope that at least GB Central is released this year

This is what I want to know too.

I want to decide where each scenery is in the library ( cfg and xml ) , being it Orbx or another developer.

With AO I have everything ordered by country and it is working perfectly for many months now...

 

[kevinfirth 1,396]

1 hour ago, GSalden said:

This is what I want to know too.

I want to decide where each scenery is in the library ( cfg and xml ) , being it Orbx or another developer.

With AO I have everything ordered by country and it is working perfectly for many months now...

 

the answer is no.

OC allows you to specify an insertion point for orbx add-ons.  It appears to then add a layer number for orbx add-ons only to make this happen.

if other add-on scenery is ascribed layer numbers through AO it appears these are NOT reordered, as when I installed OC I ended up with conflicting and messed up layers.

it was possible to reorder them how I wanted by using AO.

I also had the same issue with objectflow as described by Pete Dowson.

I have not yet migrated any Orbx product to Add-on.xml

I suspect that now the scenery layers are reset to my preference, that re-runnung OC will not mess them up again, but I haven't tested this yet.

The extension of this is that if I was to purchase another Orbx product, that would again impact on the scenery layering and produce a small number of duplicated layer numbers.  Again I haven't tested this yet, but I would expect the resulting problem to be relatively easily solved through AO.

I might purchase something today to test it!